Archive for the ‘LD #23’ Category

Mood: that’s the category I was aiming for, and being 6th out of 1402 is quite amazing, it’s a bit sad I didn’t make it in the top5 though. sound would have surely put me at least third ‘sadface’

Theme: 51th doesn’t sound so amazing – but – every game in the competition tried to score in this category so it’s really amazing being 51th: better than 96.36% of the entries!

Graphics: I’m also very impressed by this – there were so many good looking games that I didn’t think of scoring something better than 300

Overall: same here

Innovation: this on the other hand is a bit frustrating since I don’t think there were so many innovative compo games this time – I feel like half of them took place on a small globe of some sort

Fun: well – my game isn’t too much of a game

Humor: wait … I scored better in humor than ~60% of the games? with a horror game? did I miss something?

Audio: however, this is the real mystery. my game has no sound at all – how could anybody rate anything besides n/a?

Conclusion:

I’ll participate again

the rating system is seriously flawed – it’s impossible for my game to have scored place 762 in audio – with no audio at all!

a lot of compo entries broke rules – most of them didn’t include the source code and some even used assets made by others. something has to be done about this – maybe a ‘report’ button and some helpers that read those reports and move a cheating entry into the jam category

I have to focus again on one or two categories next time

12h is way not enough time to make a proper game – I’m going to use the full 48h next time

I did use the tools I know – so my workflow was quite good and I could jump into the action right away

reading through the Flashpunk documentation before LD started turned out to be a quite good idea. I learned of some function I didn’t knew exist – and although I didn’t use this specific one’s – reading the documentation of your engine is never a bad idea

this old-school 8bit style graphics are very easy for me to produce and many people like my stuff – so I assume I’m good at it. it’s a good idea to stick to what you’re good with for LD

I took some time to think about the theme and develop a pretty good concept in my head which I played through “with my mind” several dozen times. prototyping with your mind is something that people should invest more time for

what went wrong:

time management … oh boy did I screw up.
initially I thought I’d have the whole 48 hours but suddenly stuff happened and I even ended up abandoning my LD entry completely at one point. it was only several hours before the deadline that I got time to continue working and had to code in lightning-fast mode. the complete development only took about 12 hours.because of this I also had to cancel several features and make my game a lot shorter than I initially planned

I didn’t do any sound … mainly because I didn’t have the time. but also because I’m quite inexperienced with audio so I figured to finish everything else first.
as the development progressed it turned out sound is very much needed in this game and it could get literally 10 times better with some good audio – so I recorded some effects but sadly didn’t have the time to implement them

the beginning of the game is much much too long. everybody who played it in the context of LD told me so. and that’s exactly the point. I playtested it only on it’s own and didn’t realize that most people would play it in a series of LD entries, so my game would start quite lame in comparison. this is a lesson learned – always account for the fact that your game is going to be played in a series of games.

what didn’t make it in the game:

the main level was planed much much bigger. I planed platformer elements (canons, enemies, moving platforms, portals…) that should make it more of a game. during playing this the background story would have been unfold and the player would have learned how the character ended up in the asylum and a bit more about what the monster represents. I also tried to use a bit of psychology for this – the hanging chains, the long fall and the shrinking room are all symbols for his story.

the game would be much better and much more disturbing as well as thought-provoking if I had the full 48h instead just a quarter of it – it also would feature sound

what my conclusion is:

I’m happy I didn’t abandon the project and finished what I could. all in all I’m quite proud – I don’t think it’s to shabby and it’s my first LD after all.
however – for my next LD I’m definitely going to make sure to no be kept away from working on my entry.

ok – I’m actually done with all the stuff I needed to do (other than LD) and I’m still having over 8 hours to work on my game (which at this point I only worked about 5 hours on, yesterday) – so this makes this Ludum Dare into a 13hour competition for me

… I can live with that !

so – here I come – coding like a monkey on caffeine until the deadline crushes me

sadly – because of university stuff and some private reasons I can’t participate in LD#23

have fun guys !

for protocol – here’s the idea I had:

you’re playing an insane person in an asylum and think that there’s a monster around you, trying to kill you. however, you can “shoot” mental rays or something that can scare the monster away for a short time. (of course you just imagine all of it)so – you’re starting in a little tiny cell and have to scare the monster away from you – after some shots it disappears for a while and you’re alone in your tiny world. the only thing you can do is to shoot and jump around until you eventually realize that you can destroy the walls with your shots – and enter a “new” world, which is populated by similar monsters and the game is consisting out of 2 or 3 action platformer levels with the “monster” as your end boss, but you can’t defeat it, so it kills you.after all of this the screen fades out and you see your character lying on the floor in your cell. a doctor comes in and diagnosis your death.-the end